“Luck Me in Deber Doo Wah”

I’ve been re-enjoying a Matthew Sweet record I loved in the early 90s – Altered Beast. One song in particular, Falling, is knocking my socks off, so I went online and tried to learn it, and found the video below.

The video is remarkable, equally awesome and awful in a way that I love: a band in Japan called The Nowhere covers the tune for a wee audience. They have learned the song really well, accurately – the lead lines are replicated, the tone is right, etc – but while the singer appears to have a lyric sheet on his mic stand, almost none of the words are right. Much of what he sings are not words at all, unless he’s mixing Japanese and English. It’s great.

I’m not trying to be cruel or superior – I love this. It must be something else to love pop music in another language, and that must be the case all over the world with the widespread American culture dominance. It may be annoying, but it also could be great, in the way a Latin Mass used to be: because the words mean nothing to you, the words can mean anything you want.